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So it’s been nearly two years since the last post. With the advent of centrally-hosted social data there just hasn’t been much reason to maintain a personal blog aside from ad revenue and possible narcissism. As you may see, I’m out of the former and flush with the latter…

Growing up in the emergence of consumer internet service has made me paranoid. I still don’t like seeing my picture show up online. Too paranoid? Oh definitely. I’ve learned to give up some of that control and just accept that I’ll be floating about the bits like rogue cells in a huge organism for however long it takes for my virtual presence to decay. I still don’t much care to be out there.

Some weird things have happened in the last couple years. I’m in charge-ish. Someone was foolish enough to allow me to run things. what the fuck man. I’m now the Directorial contact for things that require sign-off that we’re doing things responsibly and not just randomly horsing around in the datacenter, pushing each other into the racks.

disclaimer:

lately I’ve had some bullshit come up with postfix and figured I would talk about the few most commonly useful commands to remember.

/usr/sbin/postmap

use: /usr/sbin/postmap somefile
what that does: when you edit files like relocated, transport, and whitelist, you need to run this to generate the .db file that matches those. make your additions, then postmap the file and your email will flow correctly

mailq or /usr/sbin/postqueue -p

use: shows queued messages. this is the crap that hasn’t had a chance to be shipped off. run this a few times and notice nothing seems to be moving and you might have some issues. check your maillog for more info.

/usr/sbin/postqueue -f

once you’ve fixed what you previously broke, this tries to flush/deliver everything in the queue. if you’re a badass and have no spare fucks to give, do…

/usr/sbin/postsuper -d ALL deferred

ok, that just flushes the deferred messages that simply won’t gtfo. remove “deferred” to really be a badass. that’ll kill everything still sitting in there.

your path may differ from this. this is just a pretty typical place to find these commands.

if you’re running this on ubuntu or anything with a gui, go fuck yourself with a barbed overpriced stick. sorry, i dislike ubuntu. ubuntu server w/o gui isn’t such a shitshow, but i still just don’t dig it at all. give me centos or redhat any day.

I will admit this much: i fully support getting an education in something that makes you happy or that captures your passion. This is, you have to have a backup plan or a real skill that will allow you to fund your weird dream job of doing whatever a degree in useless bullshit allows you to do.

Oh and plenty of people either a) don’t have a degree or b) have a useless degree in some nonsensical bullshit and still manage to not be homeless.

You’ll pay for it one way or another. I paid in wasted time and my wife paid in dollars. The payoff can be there for you, but you have to invest your time/money correctly. Invest your time and money in something idiotic and your return on that investment, assuming you don’t have your backup plan in place, will leave you broke for life.

There are some skills you have absolutely no excuse to lack now:

typing

being able to read basic directions

not lying about your proficiency (more likely lack) in javascript and excel

basic computer use. If a tween girl can create and edit videos then manage the content on her blog, you can figure out how to log into your computer correctly more than once.

Ya know, if you can do the above, you can find yourself a soul destroying desk job that WILL keep you fed. Retail is an experience all should have, but they should get it out of the way early, because most retail just doesn’t make any sense as a career.

when i gonna use any that n e way?

…when you grow up and decide to stop being a useless twat.

joe, you sound like a self-righteous asshole

Yer damn right I do. Know why? Because I’ve been that useless sack of shit. I’m a huge fan of the arts and have been a member since 4th grade. I get it. I get it completely. It’s fun, it’s fulfilling, and it’s fantastic. It also is inconsistent so you need to have a day job. Be hot, be good, or be adaptable.

So it’s no big secret that I enjoy my scotch. If you haven’t already, get
yourself some Lagavulin 16 year old. The link takes you to a youtube
review by a guy who is… awesome.

It should also be no big secret that I appreciate Isla peaty scotches above
all others. This is not to say the others are somehow deficient, only that my
preference lies almost entirely within the realm of smokey, peaty scotch.

The installation of my Öhlins dfv coilovers was a gift from my wife for my birthday. The coilovers themselves were a gift to me…from me 😀

A couple weeks ago I got it in my head that my suspension wasn’t adequate. I’d remembered just how unhappy I was with the shitty coilovers on my STi, but read plenty of reviews of these saying they actually improved the ride compared to stock. Armed with my trusty credit card, I ordered the set from HP Autowerks. I had a moment of panic remembering that horrible set on the STi and fired off a message to Harold@HPA asking what do if I just wanted to skip the coilovers and do the full M3 suspension swap. In short? He said it’s just not a good idea on the stock runflats and that I’d definitely be happier with the coilovers for now, assuring me the M3 suspension swap would be a better idea once I burned through the runflats. Crisis mitigated, but not entirely quelled. I was worried I was making a mistake the entire drive up last Friday.

With all that on my mind, we set out at 7am.

I got to the shop at 9am on the dot, dropped off the keys, took a look at my coilovers sitting on their workbench, and off we went to bum around downtown Santa Barbara. 4 hours later we dropped in to check it out. First thing I noticed was the car looked like it was dumped even though it was only dropped 3/4″. Damn it!

These things are \sooo nice\

They’d taken my car for a ride after getting the height dialed in so the springs could settle and they could pick a good base setting for the dampening. It was so nice to hear that come from someone who didn’t necessarily know I was there. When the shop guys like the gear, you know it’s good stuff.

Another trip to downtown and 4 more hours later my car was all done, we were packing it up, and heading off.

I’m afraid of driving your car now. I don’t want to scrape it.

She can be too cute sometimes. Truth is, the car clears everything about as well now as it did before the lowering. The suspension is stiffer, yet it’s somewhat more compliant in a lot of ways while eradicating almost all signs of body roll. The car is just a joy to drive now.

My alignment yielded some disappointing results:

front camber: -0.5L -0.5R

rear camber: –1.5L -1.5R

toe: just a little toe in all around, which I didn’t mind at all

That’ll work for now, but I’m definitely grabbing the M3 front wishbones and likely the Dinan camber plates (as much because they’re simple and cheap as anything else) for that extra degree or so of front camber I’m looking for.

These coilovers give you the worst kind of god complex. As it stands right now, the ride is fabulous and I can’t see where stiffer sways would be any benefit.

If you’re on the stock runflats, get these coilovers, leave the sways and wishbones alone, and remember that grinning stupidly driving your car for a couple hours at a time will leave your face sore.